Thursday, March 31, 2016

Trump and abortion

A furor in the news when pro-life Donald Trump said women should be punished if they got illegal abortions (then changed his mind). Democrats jumped on him, of course, but also the Republicans did too, and I think that's the real story - the Republicans and the pro-life movement were furious that Trump said out loud what they have been pursuing for years - the abolishing and criminalizing of abortion - the logical extension of their "abortion = murder" rhetoric.

The success of Donald Trump stems from one major factor: the perception that he tells it like it is because he’s beholden to no one. Whether Trump actually does tell the truth is a different question—one more often answered in the negative—but Wednesday, he did something rare for a Republican politician: he told the truth, saying that if abortion were illegal, women should be punished. (He later walked back his comments).

Commentators on the left erupted with outrage, and on the right with denial. “No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion,” said Jeanne Mancini, President of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund in a statement. “We have never advocated, in any context, for the punishment of women who undergo abortion,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-abortion-rights group Susan B. Anthony List in a statement. “Punishment is solely for the abortionist who profits off of the destruction of one life and the grave wounding of another.”

And so went the usual anti-abortion claims: Outlawing abortion should punish abortion providers, not women. Women who have abortions are ignorant victims, coerced or tricked into forsaking their true desire for motherhood by greedy doctors who exploit them for financial gain.

These are lies. But they also reveal an important idea underpinning the anti-abortion-rights movement in the U.S.: It’s not about the life of the embryo or fetus. It’s certainly not about helping or protecting women. It’s about hostility to women’s social advancement, which has been rapid, and which would have been wholly impossible without access to contraception and abortion. And it’s not just Trump whose antipathy toward women’s rights and freedoms plays out particularly pronouncedly around abortion rights. It’s Ted Cruz, it’s the anti-abortion movement, and it’s most of the Republican Party ....

[...] “While antiabortion advocates have made it as difficult as possible in various states for women to get an abortion, often use language that equates abortion with murder, and hope for a day when Roe vs. Wade is overturned, rarely do they suggest criminalizing a woman seeking an abortion in that world. That’s, at least, in part because, politically, even they know what Trump apparently didn’t: No one would stand for that.”

But that is precisely why Trump’s original comment was so disruptive. It exposed a contradiction in a lot of anti-abortion rhetoric that those activists cannot explain away, hard as they try.

If abortion is murder — or the moral equivalent thereof — it’s absurd to suggest that only the doctor who performs an abortion should be criminally responsible.

That’s Trump’s new position: "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb."

Put aside the paternalism of this explanation. (Women are pawns of presumably male doctors with no control over their own actions.) It defies logic to suggest that a person who initiates criminal act ought to be immune to punishment for it. At the minimum, the woman who seeks an abortion is an accessory to murder — if you believe abortion is murder ....

After Donald Trump said that when abortion is criminalized there must be some punishment for women who get an abortion, anti-abortion activists went into overdrive to distance themselves from his comments.

National Right to Life said it “has long opposed the imposition of penalties on the woman on whom an abortion is attempted or performed.” Other anti-choice organizations, including the Susan B. Anthony List and Priests for Life, joined in. Jeanne Mancini of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund declared flat-out, “No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion.”

That, of course, is utterly, ridiculously false. Just a few months ago, Personhood USA, a group that has been pushing for state-level laws granting legal personhood to fertilized eggs at the moment of conception, cheered the attempted murder prosecution of a woman in Tennessee who had tried to give herself an abortion. As Miranda Blue noted at Right Wing Watch in December, “In Alabama, the state supreme court has used ‘chemical endangerment’ laws to lay the legal groundwork for fetal personhood, leading to the prosecutions of nearly 500 women accused of endangering their fetuses.”

One of the co-chairs of Ted Cruz’s “Pro-Lifers for Cruz” group—announced by the Cruz campaign in January— is Troy Newman, who says a woman who has an abortion is essentially a “contract killer.” He has made it clear, in writing, that he thinks a biblical response to abortion means executing providers and treating women who have abortions as “murderers.” ....

[...] Trump will be glad to hear that women seeking abortions are already punished here in the United States of America:

1. Women are fed misleading information and outright lies by doctors compelled by law to tell them that their abortions may cause breast cancer (it doesn’t), that they’ll be prone to infertility (untrue), and that life begins at conception (up for debate). In fact, one out of three bits of information abortion providers are forced by law to tell their patients are false.

2. To get to clinics, women must walk through gauntlets of protesters calling them murderers, telling them they’re going to hell, and waving signs with bloody imagery.

3. Women must wait for a prescribed amount of time between mandatory pre-abortion counseling and the procedure in 28 states. Waiting periods make abortions more expensive, more dangerous, logistically challenging, and emotionally taxing.

4. In 14 states, women must make two separate visits to a clinic, requiring extra time and money for transportation, time off work, child care, and travel expenses.

5. In Utah, women seeking abortions at 20 weeks gestation or later are forced to take anesthetic drugs, even if it’s against their will, adding additional risk to an overwhelmingly safe procedure.

6. Two-dozen states impose redundant or unnecessary safety requirements on abortion providers, making it harder for them to stay open and serve their patients.

7. Twenty-two states impose superfluous licensing standards, and 14 require doctors to have affiliations with local hospitals. These laws are forcing clinics across the country to close, leaving women with longer distances to travel, longer wait times, and more expensive procedures.

8. Poor women cannot use Medicaid to cover their abortions, sentencing them to debilitating expenses or unwanted pregnancies and children.

9. In 38 states, girls must notify or gain consent from their parents before obtaining abortions, putting themselves at risk of financial, emotional, and sometimes physical harm.

[...] Some anti-choice activists have suggested that clinics literally hold women down and force them to have abortions. But most people floating the "coerced abortion" myth are more subtle. They pretend that unscrupulous boyfriends and clinic workers exploit women's supposed inability to make rational decisions when emotional.

In 2007, the National Review hosted a forum in which anti-choice activists laid out the theory that women are too stupid — though they shied away from that word — to make a fully informed choice to end a pregnancy. The woman is the "second victim of abortion," argued Dorinda C. Bordlee of the Bioethics Defense Fund. Villanova University law professor Joseph Dellapenna concurred, saying, "Women were victims of the abortion and not perpetrators."

Throughout the forum, participants advanced the notion that women choose abortion because the poor dears don't know "abortion for what it is" because "health and legal authorities fail to tell them," as Catholic blogger Pia de Solenni put it. And so, as Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, claimed, abortion bans are about "protection, not punishment."

In other words, much as we have laws that say a minor is too immature to consent to sex, we ought to shield women — lifelong minors, effectively — from making choices about their own bodies.

The ignorance argument is all over the latest attacks on Planned Parenthood. David Daleiden, the head of the Center for Medical Progress, told the National Review that if he had a chance to ask Cecile Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood, anything, "I would ask her if she knows abortion the way Planned Parenthood providers know abortion." ...

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

The Seventh Sign

a 1988 apocalyptic drama film written by Clifford and Ellen Green and directed by Carl Schultz. The title and plot reference the seven seals described in the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament of the Bible.

Signs of the apocalypse are appearing, along with a mysterious wanderer. Father Lucci (Peter Friedman) is the Vatican official investigating them. He dismisses the occurrences as natural, but Abby Quinn (Demi Moore) believes that they are real.

In the film, Jürgen Prochnow portrays Jesus' return to Earth in the year 1988 to judge humanity. The final judgment is averted by an act of faith that prevents the final sign of the apocalypse from occurring.

In the film, through a flashback, Prochnow also portrays the original Jesus on the eve of his crucifixion. Father Lucci is revealed to be Cartaphilus, a Roman Centurion and Pilate's porter who struck Jesus before his death and was sentenced to wander the Earth until Christ returned to judge mankind. The Lucci-Cartaphilus character is a combination of the Longinus and the Wandering Jew legends. In the movie, Abby—who is soon to give birth—discovers that she is actually the reborn woman some identify as Seraphia, the woman who offered Christ water during the Crucifixion but was turned away by Cartaphilus. She learns that the prophecies lead up to the birth of her child, who may not survive because there will be no more souls left for the newborns unless someone offers their own.

- Prochnow as Jesus

I had seen this film on tv years ago and posted something about it and it has turned out to be one of the most popular posts of the blog, according to site-meter, so I thought I'd give it a second look. This time, as back when I first watched it, I found the movie scary and very depressing. Here below is what I wrote back in 2007.

Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot: they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day that Lot left Sodom, it rained fire and sulphur from heaven and destroyed all of them —it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, anyone on the housetop who has belongings in the house must not come down to take them away; and likewise anyone in the field must not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. I tell you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.’ Then they asked him, ‘Where, Lord?’ He said to them, ‘Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.’

Yikes! I don't really understand what's meant. Is "the day the Son of Man is revealed" the same end-time scenario as is written of in Revelation? There are many interpretations of the end-time, some fairly positive like the one in this article from America magazine - Apocalypse When? - and many much less so, like that in the Left Behind books. For the most part, I try not to think about it too much, but every once in a while a movie comes along and I find myself watching despite my better judgement.

- Demi as Abby

One such movie is The Seventh Sign. I wish I could say it's a sequel to Bergman's The Seventh Seal but it's nowhere near as profound nor well done - it falls rather into the guilty pleasure category, the guilty part being its questionable theology, the pleasure part being twofold: Michael Biehn (The Terminator and Aliens) has a part in it :-) and even better, Jesus actually shows up, which is unusual in this kind of movie.

The movie, made in 1988 and starring Jürgen Prochnow of Das Boot fame as Jesus, Demi Moore, and Michael Biehn, tells the tale of the day of judgement, when Jesus returns to the earth with seven seals, breaking them one after the other, causing a number of natural disturbances. Jesus takes his time with the breaking of the seals, and while he's in LA, he rents a room over the garage of the home of Abby (Moore) and her husband (Biehn). As Abby gets acquainted with her strange lodger, she tries to figure out what the weird natural occurrences mean. A Catholic priest is also paying attention to the signs, and for good reason - he is actually a Roman Centurion who struck Jesus before the crucifixion, and who's been doomed to walk the earth undying until the second coming.

- - John Heard's priest character answers some questions about the apocalypse for Abby's Jewish friend

Roger Ebert didn't like it much and gave it 2 out of 4 stars in his review. Here's a bit of it ... ...

"The Seventh Sign" begins with portents of the apocalypse. The rivers run with blood, the sea boils, the desert freezes, the birds fall from the sky, the earth shakes, and things are not so hot out on the beach in California, either. A strange man with burning eyes has just rented the little apartment over the garage in the backyard of Demi Moore's house, and she finds ancient Hebrew manuscripts in his desk - in a secret code .....

Moore has the central role, as a woman who has lost one child during pregnancy and is now fearful of losing another. The story begins in the last two months of her pregnancy, with her husband (Michael Biehn) lending moral support ..... She provides a strong center to the film, but the rest of it, alas, is all over the map. I am not even sure I completely understood all of the details. What connection was there, for example, between the Hebrew code letters with their wax seals and the dread events that followed every time one was opened? What were those flashbacks to Roman times? Who was that strange priest who traveled around the globe, checking out the frozen deserts and bloody rivers? And on whose side was the boarder over the garage? By the end of the movie, I was fairly certain of the answers to most of those questions, but the body of the film seemed almost deliberately confused and obscure, to no purpose. Why not explain the priest's actual mission, instead of saving it for a denouement at the last minute? Wouldn't that have been more interesting? And why is it that only the characters in the movie seem to be aware that things are going to hell and the apocalypse is at hand? .....

And then there is the problem of the ending of the movie ....

I can't tell you about the end of the movie - don't want to spoil it for anyone - and neither can I tell you about the end of the world ..... your best bet is to turn back to the Gospel reading above, and good luck with that :-)

Monday, March 28, 2016

Captain Hook in the Underworld

- Hook, at a happier time

I'm really enjoying the latest from Once Upon a Time. Captain Hook, one of my favorite characters, has died and gone to the Underworld, a sort of pit stop on the way to a better or worse final destination for the dead, where those who have unfinished business must tarry. Hook's girlfriend and her family have come after him to save him from Hades, who rules the Underworld, but it's going to be complicated. Here is Hades threatening Hook ...

It probably all seems silly to those who aren't fans, but I think the show has more depth than is obvious and more heart than a thousand episodes of Game of Thrones. All the characters are well developed, with back stories that are continuously being revealed in flashbacks, making it hard to ever deliver final moral judgements on any of them. Captain Hook, or Killian Jones, is as complex as any of the others. Here we see in a flashback how he started off life as a kid ...

And after later losing his brother and killing his own father, plus a couple of centuries of antisocial behavior, he makes a final decision to do the right thing and save everyone else by dying himself ...

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Easter and Mary Magdalene

Here's the Jesus miniseries version of Jesus' burial, resurrection appearance to Mary M, and words for the disciples afterwards, including the bit deleted from the American version which shows Jesus still hanging around in the present ...

Let's take this moment to remember that it was Mary who was the first person to see the risen Jesus. And let's recall that our church turned her into a sex worker and that the church and Pope Francis still do not deem women to be the ontological or practical equals of men and will not allow them to be even deacons, much less priests. Way to follow Jesus' lead (not).

Holy Saturday

So, What Did Jesus Do On Holy Saturday? ... was he in hell, harrowing, or was he in paradise with the repentant thief? I would rather believe he was in paradise. But maybe he just stayed put in the tomb ...

Saturday Night in the Tomb - William Coleman

I like to imagine Him dancing there,
testing his limbs' limits once more, fitting
back into his body the way we might
slip back again into a forgotten
favorite shirt crumpled in the closet,
finding ourselves wrapped in an old love's
scent and remembering the moonflowers
opening in our gaze, steadying
for another long, glorious night of worship.
That's the God I believe in—the one
who can't wait to roll back the rock, leave nothing
behind, make an appearance everywhere,
yet who still loves these nights alone, the cool
darkness of His room, that sweet, solitary
music that keeps Him humming long after the dying's done.

Cellular

- Basinger and Evans

Another movie check-out from the public library, Cellular ... a 2004 American action crime thriller film directed by David R. Ellis and starring Jason Statham, Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, and William H. Macy.

- Macy

I got the movie because I wanted to see some of Captain America's earlier films :) It was actually pretty good and I especially liked William Macy's character. Here's the beginning of Roger Ebert's review, in which he gave the film 3.5 stars ...

"Cellular" stands "Phone Booth" on its head. The 2003 thriller was about a psychopath who threatens Colin Farrell with death if he leaves a Manhattan phone booth. The new one has Chris Evans racing desperately all over Los Angeles as he tries to stay on his cell phone with a woman who says she's been kidnapped. The same writer, Larry Cohen, collaborated on both projects and is no doubt currently involved in a thriller about chat rooms.

The plot of "Cellular" sounds like a gimmick, and no wonder: It is a gimmick. What's surprising is how convincing it is, under the circumstances, and how willingly we accept the premise and get involved in it. The movie is skillfully plotted, halfway plausible and well acted; the craftsmanship is in the details, including the astonishing number of different ways in which a cell phone can be made to function -- both as a telephone, and as a plot device.

Kim Basinger stars as Jessica, a high school science teacher who is kidnapped by violent home invaders and held prisoner in an attic. The men who have taken her want something from her husband -- something she knows nothing about. They know where her young son Ricky (Adam Taylor Gordon) attends school and plan to kidnap him, too. The kidnappers are hard men, especially their cold, intense leader Greer, played by Jason Statham. Because they've allowed Jessica to see them, she assumes they will eventually kill her.

The attic has a wall phone, which a kidnapper smashes to bits. But Jessica the science teacher is able to fit some of the parts back together and click on the wires to make a call -- at random. She reaches Ryan (Chris Evans), a twentysomething kid who at first doesn't believe her when she says she has been kidnapped. At one point, he even puts her on hold; that's part of the movie's strategy of building our frustration by creating one believable obstacle after another. Jessica pleads with him not to hang up, to trust her enough to hand his cell phone to a cop. Something in her voice convinces him. He walks into a police station and hands the phone to a desk cop named Mooney (William H. Macy), who gets sidetracked and advises him to go to homicide, up on the fourth floor. Uh-huh. But Mooney, too, hears something in her voice, and later in the day it still resonates. He's not your typical hot-dog movie cop, but a quiet, thoughtful professional with unexpected resources ....

Thursday, March 24, 2016

The Last Supper

- I especially like this version from The Gospel of John ... it includes Mary M at the dinner table, plus the foot washing scene ...

- And here's the version from Jesus of Nazareth. It seems very grim to me, and the music doesn't help ...

- Here is the scene from The Passion of the Christ. It has a brief foot washing bit too, though it's not shown in this clip. And while the film has subtitles,, this scene seemed really touching to me ....

- I do also like this version from the miniseries Jesus too. See, he says "this is my body, rake, eat" but not "this is my body, take, put it in a monstrance, and adore it" ;) ...

This came up multiple times in conversations this week both online and in person (the life of a religion writer), and it's something to contemplate: in spite of Pope Francis, is the Catholic church in America getting worse in terms of how it treats LGBTQ people and women? And will the incoming generation of priests, many of whom have huge egos and are obsessed with clericalism, further rob lay people of the little agency they once had? On the one hand, the priest shortage means lay people will continue to do more (mostly unpaid work); on the other, the authoritarian nature of most bishops means that priests will have the final say as to what that work looks like and how it functions. I don't have any answers here, more of a question for those of you who have opinions: what will the America church look like in 10, 20, 30 years? And what, if anything, can be done to turn that around? ....

Probably nothing, given we lay people have absolutely no voice in the church and that those few priests who do speak up for us, like Fr. Roy Bourgeois, are crushed and discarded by the hierarchy.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

The Martian

This week's movie checked out from the public library was The Martian ...

a 2015 American science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. The film is based on Andy Weir's 2011 novel The Martian, which Drew Goddard adapted into a screenplay. Damon stars as an astronaut who is mistakenly presumed dead and left behind on Mars. The film depicts his struggle to survive and others' efforts to rescue him. The film's ensemble cast also features Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

- Finally, another article by pro-life Catholic Charles Camosy on his belief (a false belief) that Democrats could destroy the GOP — if only they would welcome antiabortion liberals. That's like saying that the Democratic party could win over Republican voters if only it stood for Republican values instead of Democratic ones. There are a few pro-life Democrats, yes, but they will never have any power in the party ... the two Democratic candidates now running for president have their differences, but both are very strongly pro-choice. Camosy doesn't ever seem to understand that one of the mainstays of the Democratic party is insuring women's rights, including reproductive rights.

Saturday, March 19, 2016

Happy almost Palm Sunday

I find the movie versions of the gospel events so helpful ... they make everything a little more real for me. Here are a sew versions of Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday from some of the Jesus movies I like ....

- Here's the scene from The Last Temptation of Christ. You've got to love how it begins, with Peter asking: "Will there be angels there to meet us, or anyone besides who's here?" Jesus doesn't answer, just smiles and puts his arm around Peter's shoulders :) ...

Friday, March 18, 2016

Should Mother Teresa be made a saint?

There's been a lot in the news about the canonization of Mother Teresa. I've not paid much attention to her, aside from when it was revealed a few years ago that she had been living in a spiritual wasteland for most of her religious life - Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith - and I haven't been a fan (she was very conservative), so I was intrigued to find that not everyone is sanguine about her becoming a saint. Here's a bit from a couple of articles I saw today.

[...] To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world — the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora. A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the “myth of altruism and generosity” surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church ...

[...] In India, where Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy was called into question last year, when the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage when he criticized her intentions. “It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state in February 2015, the Times of India reported. “In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too.” .....

In his critique of Teresa, the devoutly Hindu Bhagwat would find an unlikely ally in the work of devoutly atheist Christopher Hitchens. The late British writer became one of the most vocal critics of Teresa in the 1990s, tying his reputation to assailing a woman who was, at the time, an unassailable figure. In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” You can see it for yourself below.

And here's a bit from Wikipedia (see the page for footnote sources) ...

Mother Teresa considered that suffering – even when caused by poverty, medical problems, or starvation – was a gift from God. As a result, while her clinics received millions of dollars in donations, their conditions drew criticism from people disturbed by the shortage of medical care, systematic diagnosis, and necessary nutrition, as well as the scarcity of analgesics for those in pain. Many of her critics accused her of a fundamental contradiction: It was estimated that she raised over $100 million for her charity, yet only 5-7% of this was used in catering to the poor. Some have argued that the additional money could have had transformative effects on the health of the poor by creating advanced palliative care facilities in the city. Others, both in India and abroad, criticised her opposition to abortion and contraception ...

[...] We respond to suffering simply by being truthful, avoiding denial and admitting its pain and horror, whatever the cause. We must never glorify suffering. Yes, it can lead us to deeper maturity and wisdom, but suffering can also crush the human spirit. The first step to grief and healing, then, is to move from overwhelmed silence to speech, the bold speech of lament. The Psalms show us how to speak out against suffering and oppression, even against God. But such crying out allows us both to grieve and to grow into a mature covenant partner with God. A paraphrase of Psalm 56 expresses well this relationship: ‘Be gracious to us, O God; enter our lament in your book; store every tear in your flask’.

Awareness of suffering and relationship with God allow and inspire our action. We acknowledge that, at times, our choices have caused personal and social suffering, so one form of action is moving towards repentance and a change of heart. We also suffer from sickness and many other personal challenges. In this suffering we need to reach out to others, to ask for help, to receive what they offer, to allow them to accompany us in the dark abyss.

Following the life and ministry of Jesus, we also work as individuals and as communities to overcome and end suffering. We know that some suffering results from people’s evil choices (war, injustice, oppression). We know that other suffering simply happens in a world that is not yet fulfilled (earthquakes, debilitating diseases). Our deeds include remaining with others in their suffering, along with action for political and economic issues. We cannot do everything, but we can and must do at least one thing, whatever God asks of us.

The third element in our response to suffering—trust in God—is, of course, especially challenging in suffering’s dark times. Jesus, as we have seen, is a marvellous example of trust in God. His deep, trusting relationship with Abba grounded his life and teaching, and sustained him in his suffering .... We follow Jesus’ words and life by entrusting our lives to our God, who has been called a Loving Abyss.

[...]

We can trust because there is even more: our God is a God of resurrection, of new life. Jesus’ story did not end with suffering and death, but with new and transformed life. Trust in God is not some pie-in-the-sky piety, but a profound conviction rooted in the experience of the risen Jesus. Christians are an Easter people, trusting that good overcomes evil, that life overcomes death. Christians trust that God leads us as individuals and as community in resisting evil, and brings us all to the fullness of life.

I kind of like this but it's not enough, at least for me. Instead of answers about why there is so much suffering and why God allows it to happen, we're asked to just trust (have faith?). I'm not a very trusting person. I do trust others, but that trust is conditional and based on my experience with them. I guess the question is, do you have the kind of experience with God to foster trust in him. I don't think I do.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Into Temptation

This week's movie check out from the public library was Into Temptation ...

is a 2009 independent drama film written and directed by Patrick Coyle, and starring Jeremy Sisto, Kristin Chenoweth, Brian Baumgartner, Bruce A. Young and Amy Matthews. It tells the story of a prostitute (Chenoweth) who confesses to a Catholic priest (Sisto) that she plans to kill herself on her birthday. The priest attempts to find and save her, and in doing so plunges himself into a darker side of society.

The film was partially inspired by Coyle's father, a kind but belligerent man who had considered becoming a priest in his early life. The script won the McKnight Screenwriting Fellowship from the IFP Minnesota Center for Media Arts. Into Temptation was filmed and set in Coyle's hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Several supporting roles were filled with actors from the Minneapolis – Saint Paul theater area, and Coyle himself performed in a supporting role.

What made me decide to see the movie was that the main character was played by Jeremy Sisto, who played the title role in the miniseries Jesus ...

But anyway, I liked the movie. Here's a clip of Sisto's character talking to his friend, another priest, about the woman who had confessed to him and who he had tried to find and save ....

Ask Justin Trudeau to save the baby seals

Last year at this time I got an email from Paul McCartney :) about the Canadian seal hunt - he wanted to stop it (me too). This year there is renewed hope that the next seal hunt can be stopped, given that Justin Trudeau is Canada's prime minister now.

Sunday, March 13, 2016

Jesus and the adulterous woman: the movies

a passage known as the Pericope Adulterae (/pəˈrɪkəpiː əˈdʌltəriː/)[1] or Pericope de Adultera — is a famous passage (pericope) found in the Gospel of John 7:53-8:11. In this episode, after Jesus has sat down in the temple to teach some of the people, after he spent the previous night at the Mount of Olives, a group of scribes and Pharisees confront Jesus, interrupting his teaching session. They bring in an adulteress, and invite Jesus to pass judgment upon her: should she be stoned, as Moses taught, or not? Jesus first ignores the interruption, and writes on the ground as though he does not hear them. But after the religious leaders continue their challenge, he states that the one who is without sin is the one who should cast the first stone. The religious leaders depart, leaving Jesus and the woman in the midst of the crowd. Jesus then asks the woman if anyone has condemned her. When she answers that no one has condemned her, Jesus says that he, too, does not condemn her, and tells her to go and sin no more.

Although nothing in this story contradicts anything else in the Gospels, many analysts of the Greek text and manuscripts of the Gospel of John have argued that it was "certainly not part of the original text of St John's Gospel." ...

Though it's probably an add-on, I like this story ... Jesus the friend to women, Jesus who doesn't condemn. There's lots of art on the subject, but I especially like the way it's portrayed in the movies. Four examples ...

- Here's the scene from The Passion of the Christ. Though the movies is mostly known for its Good Friday violence, it also has a lot of flashback scenes of moments in Jesus' ministry, like this one ...

- This one is my favorite example, the one from the miniseries Jesus, with Jeremy Sisto in the title role ...

Friday, March 11, 2016

Everest

a 2015 biographical adventure drama film directed by Baltasar Kormákur ... starring an ensemble cast which features Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes, Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley, Emily Watson, and Jake Gyllenhaal .... It is based on the real events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, and focuses on the survival attempts of two expedition groups, one led by Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and the other by Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal)

I wanted to see the movie because I had tried but failed to read the book on which the movie is (or is not?) based, and also because I like a lot of the actors in the film. It was also visually beautiful, scenery-wise. But it was incredibly depressing ... almost everyone dies, and not in glorious and dramatic ways, but in often silent, unremarked, pointless ways .... the meaninglessness of their deaths and the indifference of nature was devastating, at least to me. I don't mean to say by this that the movie wasn't good - I think it's a testament to the great acting and well-told story that it affected me.

Richard Roeper liked it very much. Here's his video review of the film ...

The Pope and Bill Gates

Reading today about Pope Francis meeting many wealthy and powerful people, from actors like Leonardo Di Caprio to the heads of companies like Apple, Google, and Instagram. But he wouldn't meet with Bill Gates ....

[...] Francis just narrowly missed receiving in audience Bill Gates himself, the absolute top dog of Microsoft, in addition to being the richest man in the world according to the Forbes ranking. The proposal was shot down by a pair of African cardinals, who reminded the pope that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is highly active in promoting abortion in poor countries.

But that's not true, at least not for the last two years - the Gates Foundation doesn't promote abortion, it tries to help women who want contraception to access it ...

Monday, March 07, 2016

Editorial on Cardinal Pell

[...] The fact is that the church was institutionally complicit in allowing men in positions of authority, in hundreds of dioceses worldwide, to abuse children, thereby damaging or wrecking their lives.

Even now, the church’s foot-dragging continues. While hundreds of priests have been defrocked and disciplined, bishops — the princes of the Catholic Church, sovereign in their dioceses — have only rarely been held to account, despite constant demands by victims’ groups and reformers.

Mindful of that criticism, the Vatican last summer announced that Pope Francis would establish a tribunal to judge bishops who enabled or turned a blind eye to pedophile priests. But nothing has been heard from the tribunal since, and the impunity of all but a handful of bishops remains a fact.

I've been aware of Cardinal Pell in a negative way for about the last decade. Here's a past post in which I mention some of the reasons why ...

[...] The Rev. Thomas Reese, an expert on Vatican polity, explains the dilemma: Cardinals are princes of the church and bishops are its nobles. They can’t resign from their spiritual status. But they can resign from their institutional role.

“The minimum we want is for them to stand up and say that they did wrong and they take full personal responsibility and resign. If they did that, I think we can accept that. We might even forgive them,” said Reese.

“But when they fight tooth and nail to stay in their job with all its perks, we are offended,” he said.

“The cardinals wear read because they are willing to die for the church,” said Reese. “They ought to be willing to take a bullet for the good of the church and resign. It’s the closest thing the church has to capital punishment.”

Why do I feel so vengeful about this? And am I alone in this feeling? I suspect not .....

Cardinal Müller, Klaus Mertes SJ, and Spotlight

His creepy minimizing of the badness of clergy sex abuse and its cover-up comes as no great surprise to me (he has some creepy ideas about women and marriage as well). Here's a bit of what Müller said ...

"The vast majority of priests have been bitterly wronged by the generalizations regarding abuse," he said, recalling that criminal statistics showed that most sexual abusers were found within the family circle. "They are fathers and other relatives of the victims. One cannot, however, draw the inverse conclusion that most fathers are therefore possible or actual perpetrators."

He is wrong. Fr. Anthony Ruff OSB of Pray Tell wrote a bit about this in a comment a few years ago (12/3/2013 - 5:48am ) ... Sure abuse happens in families .... let’s compare family members’ total contact with children with that of Catholic priests. Of course there is way more abuse in families – but how much more, and is it proportionate? What we really need – but I’m not aware of such data – is a comparison of the rates of child abuse by married Protestant and Orthodox clergy with the rates among celibate Catholic clergy. I know of no proof that the Catholic rate is equal or lower, and I suspect it is higher. I can’t imagine that all these Protestant ministers have been abusing children and somehow the media missed it. The obvious difference between Catholic and Protestant clergy is celibacy ...

And Professor Patrick Parkinson has written ... [B]etween 1% and 2% of the male population would be expected to be convicted for some form of sexual offence over their lifetime (including sex offences against adults). If those figures are similar for Australia, then Cahill's research would indicate that the rate of convictions for Catholic priests who studied at the seminary in Melbourne is much higher than in the general population (3.7% of those ordained between 1940 and 1966 and 5.4% of those ordained between 1968 and 1971) ..... [R]ates of reported child sexual abuse by priests and religious in the Catholic Church are many times higher than for clergy and paid pastoral staff such as youth workers, in other denominations .... The figure for the number of victims in the Catholic Church was exactly 10 times that in the Anglican Church ...

Back to Müller ...

"For me hushing something up means deliberately preventing a recognized criminal offense from being punished or not preventing a further offense from occurring," Müller said. "Now, as we all know, in past decades the state of knowledge regarding sexual abuse was very different from that of today. Unfortunately, no one had their eye on the long-term consequences of sexual abuse in those days, as, thank God, we have today. Seriously admonishing the perpetrator was often thought -- somewhat naively perhaps -- to be enough."

Because back in the "olden days" of the cover-up ... we're talking like the late 90s in Spotlight ... no one could have been expected to realize that raping children was a bad thing???? Perhaps the fact that it was a crime would have been the first clue.

As the article goes on to state, Müller himself has been accused of covering up abuse ...

Jesuit Fr. Klaus Mertes, the whistleblower who first unveiled the abuse in the Jesuit College in Berlin during his tenure as headmaster in 2010, has called for Müller to step down .... According to Mertes, when Müller was Bishop of Regensburg from 2002-2012, he ignored the German bishops' conference's guidelines which recommended that priests sentenced for sexual abuse of minors should never again be allowed to work with children or young people and reinstalled a priest in a parish who had served a prison sentence for abuse.

"Instead of stepping down, Bishop Müller, who covered up and obscured sexual abuse when he was in the highest position in the church in his diocese, has climbed the hierarchical ladder just like that," Mertes said. "… He still continually speaks of 'malicious press campaigns' against the Catholic church. Not a sign of remorse .... "In my opinion, that is intolerable -- above all, intolerable for the victims," Mertes continued. "How can this man, who is the head of the Congregation finally responsible for abuse, of all things, ever again be credible?"

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Today: the Supreme Court abortion case

From PBS Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly ...

Today the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the biggest challenge to abortion rights since 2007. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the justices will consider whether to strike down a Texas law, HB2, that would leave the state with only nine or 10 clinics, and not a single abortion provider west of San Antonio ... Here Are the Stakes in the Abortion Case Before the Supreme Court Today

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider arguments in the most important case it has heard on abortion rights in two decades. Whole Woman's Health vs. Hellerstedt is a challenge by a group of abortion clinics to a 2013 Texas law that requires doctors providing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and directs abortion clinics to meet the safety standards of ambulatory surgical centers. These mandates, though they may at first sound reasonable, will in fact dramatically reduce the ability of Texas women to obtain abortions, and for no sound medical reason. The court should make it clear that this aw — like hundreds of others enacted around the country — is an antiabortion measure that has been cynically passed off as a protection for women. The justices should side with the clinics and strike it down ...

Tuesday, March 01, 2016

Spotlight, Cardinal Law, and Pope Francis

Spotlight is a 2015 American biographical crime drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. The film follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests. It is based on a series of stories by the actual Spotlight Team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The film stars Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian d'Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, and Billy Crudup.

The film was excellent. I recommend it highly. I barely know where to begin in describing it, so instead I've added some links below that may be of interest. What I do want to write about here is this ....

Representatives of the church have put a positive spin on the film, giving the impression that the institutionalized abuse is all a thing of the past, that Pope Francis has fixed the problem, that all that's left to be done now is for the church to be forgiven. This narrative is disingenuous.

Perhaps what is the most creepy is that Cardinal Law, who has been proven to have covered up clergy sex abuse in Boston, was not punished by the Vatican for what he had done when he fled Boston for Rome. Instead he was rewarded - made Archpriest of one of Rome's most important churches, the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore ...